Mastermind 2026 First round Heat Four

Maybe unfairly, I often feel that when Mastermind returns after arbitrarily being taken off for a week or more the BBC owe us a top class edition. As we saw after the prolonged Christmas break last season, we don’t always get it. So would last night’s show go with a bang or turn out to be a damp squib?

Well, it certainly started brightly enough. Basab Majumdar was answering on the playing career of the great Sunil Gavaskar. Now, when I tell you that of all four of last night’s subjects this was supposedly my banker, then all that tells you is just how little I know about all four subjects. To be precise, I got none of these, even by randomly shouting out cricketing test playing countries whenever given the opportunity. Basab was very well prepared, and from where I was sitting a double figure score seemed the least that he deserved.

Alright, I have seen the first Hunger Games movie. That’s not where I got my singular specialist point from though. No, in a unit of work I taught for the last few years we used a passage from the original book which is how I knew Katniss’ little sister’s name. Thus concluded the specialist round for me. Not so for Hannah Mimiec. Like Basab before her she seemed very well prepared and a double figure round of 10 seemed only fair. I don’ know, there was something in the specialist rounds last night, which meant that each of them ended up with a point less than I would have said they were worth.

On with Miles Searle. Miles was answering on Leonard Bernstein. Again, this was another very well prepared contender. I don’t know much about Mr. Bernstein – as demonstrated by my zero points on the round – but this was a wide ranging, testing round. I thought that Miles was unlucky to miss out on double figures. Still, being realistic it did mean that he was only one point off the lead, with only one other contender to go.

That final contender was Devon Krohn. Devon is a teacher trainer. I’m not sure if that means she trains people to be teachers, or she delivers INSET to train people who are already teachers. Well, even if the latter is the case we won’t hold that against her. Ah, INSET, or as I like to think of it, the best part of 1000 hours of my life that I will never get back. However, I digress. Devon was answering on Edvard Munch, brilliantly, as it happened. She scored a perfect round answering every question correctly, yet only scored 11. It wasn’t as if she was going particularly slowly either. As I said, something in the air in last night’s show?

Normally you wouldn’t be first back to the chair for GK if you had scored 9 in the Specialist round. However that’s exactly what happened to Miles. How did he respond? By going like billy-o, showing an impressive breadth of knowledge and answering 13 questions correctly. All of which shows just how important momentum is. When you go first in the GK round all you can do is post the best score that you can and hope to do enough to at least put the others within the corridor of doubt. In Miles’ case this was a job well done.

It's relatively rare to see a round come completely off the rails. Poor Basab Majumdar had the horrible experience of needing to score 12 to just draw level, then seeing his first four answers miss the mark. I give him full credit for taking stock on the fifth, dredging up the right answer and building a score from there, but in all honesty it looked a struggle. He finished with a total score of fifteen. Sometimes it’s just not your night, I’m afraid.

To get 13 in a Mastermind specialist round you either need a very good general knowledge – you might almost say a quizzer’s general knowledge – or a lot of luck. Only having Hannah Mimiec’s round to judge by, I would say that luck didn’t seem to have much to do with it. She scored 9, a good total in this day and age, but not a great one. Not a quizzer’s one and not a heat winner’s one. She finished on a very respectable 19.

Only Devon remained. If you’re an experienced quizzer the answers contenders give to one or two specific questions will give you an idea whether the contender is going to finish with a big score or not. Devon gave a couple of these early doors in her round which made me think she was going to fall short of the target. Like Hannah before her she scored 9. That’s a good score and in the current era anything in the 20s is a good total. But even so it meant that she finished outside the winner’s enclosure.

So very well done to Miles. He hinted that he is a very young Masterminder indeed by saying that he is on a gap year before starting university, which means he may be 18 or 19. If he went on to win the series he would in that case be the youngest ever. Such talk is premature, so when he did explain that his Dad is a taxi driver and he thought he could maybe chalk up another one for the cabbies by going all the way, namechecking the great Fred Housego, I did worry a little. I just think that this sort of thing unnecessarily tempts Fate. Nonetheless, I give you my congratulations, Miles. Well done and best of luck in the semi finals.

The Details

Basab Majumdar	The playing career of Sunil Gavaskar	10	0	5	1	15	1
Hannah Mimiec	The Hunger Games	10	0	9	0	19	0
Miles Searle	Leonard Bernstein	9	0	13	0	22	0
Devon Krohn	Edvard Munch	11	0	9	0	20	0